Between Two Worlds (38 page)

Which party was it? I had no idea. It was in a large carpeted room somewhere in Baghdad, a palace maybe, though it was hard to tell where. Except for the singer, all I could hear was the background chatter of women talking to each other in the slightly elevated voices used everywhere at parties. Sometimes the soundtrack went out altogether and the women danced on in silence, arms and wrists crossing each other high in the air. Then, abruptly, I found myself face to face with the girl I had been hiding from, the pilot’s daughter, a girl of maybe seventeen, exactly half my age now. My hair was still long and curly. I was wearing a gray dress and was seated on one of a dozen sofas against a wall at a party. The photographer must have set up his tripod across the room from me because I was in the background, which was where I always tried to be. I clapped inattentively, slightly out of synch with the women around me, until that girl who had been me shyly stood up, put on her plastic smile, and joined the crowd as it danced to a patriotic song.

All the old anxieties I associated with those parties came back. I had put all this away, not unlike the way my aunts had put away their old lives, but someone had invaded this hated past and made my “artificial” life real again. I had chosen to be in Iraq at that moment as president of an international women’s organization—not as a child who had been called a “beloved one” by the despot who had caused the chaos in which we were all living. Would anyone recognize me?

I spent a nearly sleepless night in the same room where I had once held my mother because I was afraid of losing her after her attempted suicide. I was afraid. But I was even more afraid of the fear. I couldn’t live my life in pieces anymore. I couldn’t ignore the person I was, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the person I had become. I was that girl. I am this woman. I am both.

 

 

I was in a conference in Jordan when we heard the news that Saddam Hussein was captured. I watched the television screen as Amo crawled up out of what American soldiers called a “spider hole.” There was no air-conditioned bunker. There were no closets of canned goods or stashes of whiskey or even a bodyguard or a bar of soap. He was living in the Tikriti dirt in a pit of his own making. As he crawled up out of that hole, looking dirty and disheveled in a way I could never have fathomed, I think the man I called Amo and the dictator I called Saddam Hussein finally came together for me. I was shocked to find myself shed tears of pity. My tears were more for me than for him; I didn’t want to enjoy another person’s humiliation even if he was my enemy. One Iraqi woman at the conference looked around as we were all watching his capture on television and said, “This is revenge for my father!” I learned that day that her father had been killed the same day as Basma’s father. “This is to avenge my brother!” an Iraqi man said. “For my mother,” I murmured quietly to myself. I could no longer justify being afraid. I wasn’t a government so I couldn’t charge Amo with crimes, but I could carry out my own personal truth and reconciliation commission.

I wanted to talk with my father. I had tried, but he seemed caught between past and present, a lost soul searching for his own peace who spent evenings with his new wife and hours every morning walking in our old neighborhood or working in our garden. During the years I was gone, he had patiently clipped our hedges and trees into towering topiary sculptures. He was no longer able to fly, but when he stood in the middle of our backyard in the Airlines Neighborhood, he was surrounded with enormous leafy birds rooted in the soil and stretching their wings as if to take flight.

Of all people, Baba, why didn’t you just fly us away to safety?

Out of loyalty to Mama after their bitter divorce, I had never met his new wife. But, one day, I decided I wanted peace in our family, and I went to his new house to meet her for the first time. Baba embraced me with tears in his eyes as he welcomed me to his new home and introduced me to her. She was generous enough to give Baba and me time alone. He and I sat together in their garden drinking tea, eating fresh almonds and pistachios and smoking mint-flavored
sheesha
tobacco in my grandfather’s water pipe. It was a beautiful evening. I felt more relaxed around him than I had in a long time, and I could see the tension in his face beginning to loosen.

It was with new humility that I was able to ask him questions about the past.

“I want to talk with you about Amo, Baba,” I said. “Mama told me many things. I finally have my peace with her with all that happened in the past, my marriage, my being left in America, all of that.”

“You know I didn’t want you to leave, Zainab,” he said.

“Yes, Baba, I know, and I always appreciated your position,” I said. “But now, I want the chance to learn from you about our relationship with Amo. Now that he is gone, I would like to talk with you about all the things we never could talk about before. More than anything else Baba, I want to know this: Why didn’t you leave?”

He thought about that. I didn’t know if he would answer.

“You know, Zanooba, I never wanted that relationship, nor did your mother,” he said. “We were not interested in politics or politicians ever and we kept telling ourselves he would never come that close. By the time he took over our lives, it was too late for us to leave and too dangerous for the family members we would leave behind.”

My father was acknowledging his fear of Amo to me for the first time in his life. It made me wonder what he was processing in his daily walks.

“Besides, Iraq is my home, Zainab. This is my country. I had three children. I was responsible for your education and well-being. How could I have provided for you if I had taken you out of the country? I couldn’t have given you the life you had if we had left, Zainab. And when an opportunity came, it came at a price I was not willing to pay.”

“You had a chance to leave and you didn’t?”

He told me a story I vaguely remembered hearing years before, though I couldn’t have pinpointed when, about a Boeing executive eager to sell airplanes to Saddam Hussein. Once, when Baba was in his office, the executive had signed a blank check and pushed it across the table to him. “A million? More? Write what you like!” the executive had said.

“I pushed the check back across the desk,” Baba said. “To take it would have meant losing everything I had: my ethics, my principles, my self-respect. I couldn’t do that, Zainab. I don’t regret it. I never did. Staying in Iraq came at a price but it was better than the price of losing who I was in my own eyes.”

I was reminded of the same stubborn man who wouldn’t let Samira in our house on principle. For the first time in many years, I felt sympathy and enormous respect for my father. His integrity had come at a price, but at least I understood why he felt he had to pay it. What did courage mean in his case? Was it not compromising his own ethics? Despite the price our family had paid, I realized as he spoke that I would rather be the daughter of a man who made such a choice than the daughter of a man who took a bribe and sold out his country. Who said courage was defined only one way? That the only smart fish was the first fish? Oh God, I thought as I sat with my father, who gave me the right to judge my parents at all? Each of us had to find our own way. I saw that now, and I needed Baba to see it, too.

“You named me after a figure that was known for her courage and for her speaking about injustice,” I said. “I used to think about myself as such a person until it came down to the question of me speaking out on behalf of me and our own family.”

And I began talking to my father about the most intimate parts of my life. I told him about Fakhri and how I had gone back and forth debating whether to speak out about what he had done to me. I told him I felt I had lived two lives and that to bring the two back in focus, I couldn’t keep silent anymore. I didn’t believe that a family’s honor should be borne by women when the price of that honor is their silence about things that hurt them and their families. I was worried that raising my voice about family concerns, not just those related to sex, could cause some to consider me to be dishonoring my loved ones. But if there was anything a woman owned, wasn’t it her voice? And if I wanted to raise mine to tell my own story, how could I possibly separate it from the stories of the ones I love?

“You made your choices to be true to your values, Baba,” I said.

“Today it is my turn to do the same, and I need your support. I need to take control of my own voice, and that entails breaking our family vow of not talking about our relationship with Amo. Our family has always been lost between two worlds, Baba. People inside the palace considered us outsiders and people outside considered us friends of Saddam. If we remain silent, people will think our silence was agreement. I can’t remain silent anymore. If we don’t write our truth, history will write it for us.”

He had remained quiet as I spoke. The furrow between his eyebrows deepened.

“This is your decision, Zainab,” he said finally. “I just want you to know that I always tried to be a good father to you.”

I could ask no more of him than that.

“I know, Baba,” I told him. “I love you.”

And we reached over and held onto each other trying to understand each other’s paths and the price each of us paid for taking them.

When I was little, my father showed me what it meant to fly. Later, my mother pushed me out of the cage. I didn’t take the flight path either laid out for me, but between them they gave me wings.

We opened our office of Women for Women International in my grandfather’s house. Mama had always told me that the house she had grown up in was a house of charity, and I went back to look for it after I arrived in Baghdad. The neighborhood was impoverished and wary of outsiders. The streets were filled with uncollected trash and sewage—part of Saddam’s institutionalized ghettoization of predominantly Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere. As I walked up Mama’s old street and tried to identify which house had been hers, I felt myself being watched from windows.

“What are you looking for?” a man asked me warily.

“I am the granddaughter of Hajji Mohammed,” I said, using my grandfather’s name. “I am his granddaughter.”

His expression completely changed. He opened his arms.

“Of course!” the man said.

Suddenly I was surrounded by a flock of children and I felt myself being swept along by strangers and into the old house. A homeless family had been living there watching the house for our family and they gave me tea. Pigeons were nesting everywhere and the windows were shattered. But, we rebuilt Mama’s childhood home into a place where women could meet and learn new job skills and organize. We filled rooms with cushions on the floor where they could talk about their social, economic, and political roles in society, as well as just share laughter and tears. I remember in particular the day we held an event to celebrate a small but critical victory: a neighborhood organizing campaign in which women had overcome a cultural proscription against women cleaning public streets. Hundreds of women in black
abayas
filled the courtyard. I couldn’t help myself; tears started dropping from my eyes. The house looked as I had imagined it from my mother’s stories about Ashura and other times when my grandparents used to open their home. We brought out that day the same pots my grandparents had used, only instead of
fasenjoon tourshana
and rice, they were filled with kebab sandwiches, pizza, and cans of Pepsi.

“I am back, Mama,” I told her. “I wish you were here with me.”

I went upstairs to her old room, an office now, and walked out onto her balcony. I looked over the river that was rising once again and breathed in air that was free of Saddam. I followed the shadows of the gulls scatter-flying the clay-colored water and reminded myself that our choices were not easy ones. Amo had commanded fish to swim in his lakes. He had reduced the Tigris to a trickle and drained the ancient marshes that led to the sea. When did our choosing times come? I heard the call to prayer from a mosque near the ancient shrine of the prophet Khedir, also known as Elijah. I looked across the river to the spot where the boatmen could moor once again and saw one of the world’s oldest universities. Beyond, in a troubled afternoon sky, I could see a cloud of black smoke rising. How many cities on earth were so desperate to survive they nearly tore themselves apart trying? How many were so old and yet unborn? The damp fresh smell of the Tigris took me back to my childhood. I remembered my mother’s eyes rimmed with kohl as she had stood on this balcony years before. Terrible things are happening, Mama, but Amo is gone. Between the world of right-doing and the world of wrong-doing there is a meeting ground. There is a garden where women no longer need to whisper, I know it. Your real country is where you’re heading, Mohammed said, not where you are.

AFTERWORD

AFTER I FINISHED GIVING a speech about the journey of women refugees at a gathering of women journalists in the fall of 2002, many of the audience members came to the stage with questions and comments. One of the women standing around the podium looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had met her until she introduced herself as Laurie Becklund, a journalist from Los Angeles. I immediately interrupted her as she started to ask a question. “I have a newspaper story written about me during the first Gulf War in the
Los Angeles Times
. It was by a reporter named Laurie . . .” She took a step back and looked at me. “You’re not that same Zainab, are you?” she asked, incredulous, with a surprised look on her face. “Yes, I am. I look different now. I am different now,” I responded as chills spread all over my body.

Laurie covered Iraqi Americans during the first Gulf War and had met me at a press conference held by the Iraqi-American community in Los Angeles. She noticed a young woman who was constantly crying on the sidelines. She wrote a story about how I had been stranded in America while I didn’t know whether my family was dead or alive in Iraq. That was the first of several stories in the
Los Angeles Times,
and led to a series of interviews I did on U.S. and international television networks about life in Iraq through my eyes, about how Iraqis had normal families and professional lives, and even about a letter my mother had sent me during the war describing the hardship they were going through as they tried to survive. While many Iraqi-Americans were being harassed because of their national heritage, I saw the most kind and generous side of Americans, mainly due to her coverage. People would stop me in the mall where I worked, asking if I needed anything, giving me hugs and sharing their prayers for my family’s safety.